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Appeared on: Thursday, March 31, 2011
Amazon.com Seeks Licensing Deals With Record Companies

Amazon.com is courting the world's big music companies as it seeks licensing deals that would help improve the online music service it launched Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The moves are also an attempt to calm the music groups' concerns over the lack of notice of the online retailer's plans, the WSJ says.

Amazon Cloud requires users to copy every song in their music library to a remote server, which then plays back those songs to any Internet-connected PC and to Android smartphones.

Digital music libraries can be uploaded to Amazon's new Cloud Drive, with 5 gigabytes of memory available free. Users who purchase an album from Amazon.com will be upgraded to 20 gigabytes of Cloud Drive space, which can be used to store music, photos, videos and other digital files.

The sevice could arise IP issues since is would allow up to five people to simultaneously listen to a song stored at its servers. In addition, the service would require vast amounts of storage capacity to operate, so cooperation from record labels could help Amazon offer a better experience to its users. By licensing the music, Amazon wouldn't have to store separate copies of the music for each customer, instead letting multiple users stream tracks from the same copy kept on Amazon?s servers.

Amazon's move is interpreted s a bid to get ahead of Apple and Google, which is developing a similar service.